Boggy

(I heard this tale from Traci Jo the Barmaid, who was kicking my butt for two bucks a game at nine ball in a big city alt-country bar off Castro Street, San Francisco. To keep her from wiping out my meager supply of fun tickets, I suggested that we dance.)

     “No way. I have had enough of men. They have too much skin in all the wrong places. I know, I was married to two of them. The first was a Momma’s boy, never could make a decision, wanted the crusts cut off his toast. I ditched him when I found a big pair of lace panties in the laundry that didn’t belong to me. I hid them in a plate of spaghetti that I served to him that night. When he forked them out of the noodles he went to hemming and hawing and turned red as the pasta sauce. Then he dug out his wallet and showed me a picture of his entire bowling team decked out in women’s clothes and confessed that the panties belonged to him. For some reason that was enough for me to walk out of the house and find a room down here, paid for by draining his bank account.

    “The second one I met right over there by the jukebox. He was a big, tall hunk of a biker. I fell in love when I sauntered over to suggest a song and he told me to back off, that he didn’t need help to figure out what he liked. Two weeks later we putted up to Reno, got hitched, and he moved in with me.

     “His real name was Earl, but the guys in his motorcycle club called him Boggy because he worked in a Del Monte factory across the Bay as a pickle fisher, standing by a vat of vinegar and spices all day with different net sizes, picking cucumbers out of the brine. He smelled like his work.

     “We had a lot of fun for about as long as it takes to say it. Earl was a drinker, beer mostly, and he could hold it, but you toss hard liquor into the mix and he got just a little mean. One day after work he laid down on the couch and died. Bang. The coroner said it was a combination of his job and his boozing. Thinned things out to where he had an aneurism. I gave the bike to his little brother, who sold it to buy toot. I will kill him if I ever see him again.

     “To stave-off the loneliness I went out and bought a teenage iguana, named it Boggy. It slept mostly on the TV, where it was warm. While I worked the afternoon shift down here, I would leave the window to the fire escape open enough so Boggy could get out and lay in the sun.

    “A few months later, a cute young urban cowboy wants to buy me a drink after work. Sure, why not? Use it or lose it. Four drinks later we were in the apartment and he had his boots off, working on his belt buckle, when Boggy came back from sunning. The kid totally freaked, ran over to the window and slammed it on Boggy’s head, killing him.

     “I chased the little butthead out of the apartment with one of Earl’s pistols. Told him to go a long way away for a long time or I was going to shoot his plaything off. He left barefoot. These are the boots he was wearing. Like them? Ever try flushing an iguana? Shut up and shoot pool.”

     

 

 

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